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Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977

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Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: John W. Mauchly (1907-1980) Interviewer: Uta C. Merzbach Date: June 22, 1970 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History MERZBACH: All right, shall we start then about the time that you left high school? MAUCHLY: Yes. Well, sometime during my senior year in high school, I had a little change of direction, in that I'd been expecting to go to the engineering school at the University of Cincinnati. The reason being, for one thing, my father had gotten his doctor's degree from the University of Cincinnati, and I had learned from him that they had an engineering program there, which allowed you to work part of the time while you were studying your engineering subjects. You'd go out six weeks someplace and then you'd come back and study for six weeks. This was known as a cooperative plan. It had some educational advantages, in that you got acquainted with the use of your engineering in, you might say, the real world. It also had some monetary advantages in that you would be paid, you would earn some money while you were doing this. It sounded as if it was a way to get through school without a large amount of financing. That was what I was thinking about when one of my English teachers suggested that, since I lived in Maryland, I might possibly qualify for a state scholarship to the Johns Hopkins University Engineering School. I guess it was the first time that I knew Johns Hopkins had an engineering school. Lots of other people have known Johns Hopkins as a medical school, and didn't know anything about the rest of the school. I went into this, and found out that it was possible to take an examination and apply for an engineering scholarship. I went to Baltimore and took the examination sometime, I guess, in the spring, but well ahead of the enrollment time for the college, and I was told by the senator to the State Legislature, who had to recommend and approve you, that I'd done well in the examination and that he would gladly recommend me. So, indeed I got this scholarship, and went to Johns Hopkins School of Engineering on the state scholarship for, I think, the first two years--l925-26 and l926-27. Somewhere in there, I got a bit fed up with the engineering. This was partly because the early basic courses in engineering seemed to be, largely, what you might call cookbook style courses, where you learn to design something by following a formula or table in a handbook, and I didn't seem to learn much about the fundamental background of natural phenomena. In part, it was also due to the fact that some of the other people that I knew through my father's work were in physics. In fact, some of them were employees of the Carnegie Institution, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, where my father worked, who were taking graduate work in physics at John Hopkins and were instructors in the undergraduate physics work. These were such people as Merle Tuve For additional information, contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 2 John Mauchly, June 22, 1973, Archives Center, National Museum of American History and Lawrence Hampsted, who were working part of the time at Carnegie Institution, and also doing degree work at Hopkins. So I naturally swung over to the idea that what they were doing in physics was more interesting. This was where the real fun lay. This was where the action was, you might say, so at the end of my second year of engineering, I made arrangements to transfer to the physics department and started working toward a Ph.D. degree. At that time, I believe, the President of Johns Hopkins was a man named Goodnow, and he had announced a plan known as the Goodnow Plan, which made it unnecessary for you to get any intermediate degrees. If you wanted to get a Ph.D., you didn't have to stop for a bachelor's degree, or for a master's degree. You could just work right through. So, I undertook to do this. Of course, I couldn't have done this without some financial help, and it turned out that the Department of Physics had something known as the Quincy Scholarship, which I was eligible for. I also could earn part of my tuition as a laboratory assistant, sort of a junior instructor. The more senior graduate students would actually teach sections of the physics classes, while the junior ones presided in the laboratories. So, I did this for the next two years, at the end of which time, l929, I would have been graduating with a bachelor of engineering if I had stayed in engineering school, but in this case I wasn't getting any degree at all. I was merely going on toward fairly advanced work in physics. The only way I added to my record, you might say, was in l929. I was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa; and also to Sigma Xi, the two honorary societies which normally don't select their membership from the same sources. Usually, if you're a Phi Beta, you're not a Sigma Xi and vice versa, but somehow I managed to get both of them. MERZBACH: Was there anything during this period, as far as the training was concerned, that you think was particularly useful, relevant or, on the other hand, might as well have been dropped from the curriculum? MAUCHLY: Well, I don't remember particularly. I guess the most useful thing from my point of view, was just the general atmosphere. Here I was in the Department of Physics essentially, with other people who were working with me, and some of them were more advanced students, and it was more of a scholarly and research atmosphere than I would have had in the Engineering Department. I remember that somewhere along the line in there, we developed a thing which we called the "three hours for lunch club", I believe. We hardly ever took three hours actually, but it was a nice name for the club. The new physics building had been built on campus, whereas my first few years of physics were actually within the engineering building, where we used to conduct our graduate laboratory underneath the pitched roofs, where the head room was rather slight. When we got the new physics building, we had more than enough room for a while, and so some of the rooms at the top floor of the new physics hall were available for having our own little lunch club. We brought an electric grill and a few things like that, and a number of us would go up there at lunch time and fix our grilled sandwiches. That seemed to be the age For additional information, contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 3 John Mauchly, June 22, 1973, Archives Center, National Museum of American History of pasteurized cheese products; Old English and Velveeta Cheese had just come on the market. They'd get a big loaf of those things, and slice it up with bread that we'd bought at fairly standard rates at the store, and you'd had a very cheap lunch at the same time a good conversation with the people that you were lunching with. There were also some interesting ways of passing lunch times. Somewhere along the line I met some girls who were in the Psychology Department and who were working with Johnson Institute, was it, of Child Psychology, on Hopkins campus. They had a nursery school there to practice with. One of the ways they kept their budget down was to go out and buy some bread and other things, and come back and fix lunch in the Psychology Department's nursery school quarters. I'd go over there and visited them, and be accessed thirteen cents for lunch, because that's what the materials cost. MERZBACH: Did you pursue any particular projects in that time, or within any specific areas of physics, do you remember anything that seemed to occupy your thoughts? MAUCHLY: I don't think there was anything terribly compelling or exciting in the way of new ideas. I mean I was anxious to get into some things which sounded interesting. Professor Murnaghan, for instance, was well-known for his courses on tensor analysis and things of that sort, and so I tried to fathom these, and was, I'd say, mainly impressed by the delicacy and accuracy of his handwriting at the blackboard. He would write very small script letters on the blackboard with precision of alignment, and everything exactly right. His chalkboard calligraphy was wonderful. Murnaghan was an interesting lecturer, but I can't say that I really took to the use of tensor analysis as the powerful tool it could be if you use it right, but it was an interesting course anyway. I guess one of the things that fascinated me as much as anything, was to watch other people doing glass blowing in the student glass blowing shop and try my hand at that too. At any rate, somewhere along the line, I made the decision, if you want to call it that, not to make a decision. Namely, I decided that I didn't want to stick exclusively to theoretical work or exclusively to experimental work.
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